The University of Alabama Student Center is always busy at lunchtime, but if you walk by at midday on a Friday, you’ll see room 2100 is nearly packed. What is it — free football tickets? An unannounced appearance from Taylor Swift?
None of the above. The big draw is the International Coffee Hour.
“International Coffee Hour is really our premier event that our office puts on,” said Mitchell Wolf, international programs coordinator for the Office of International Student and Scholar Success.
“We really want to facilitate intercultural learning on campus,” Wolf said. “We want to expose University of Alabama students to what the world is like out there through meeting international students, to exposing them to culture, while also supporting our international students that are here far away from home.”
Launched as a small event more than two decades ago, International Coffee Hour now attracts close to 300 students every week – about 100 more than last year’s average.
Each week, the coffee hour salutes a different country. ISSS usually draws from the top ten countries where UA’s international students come from, plus a mix of other nations. A light lunch prepared by Bama Dining reflects the cuisine of that week’s country. This spring the global hopscotch includes Bangladesh, Nigeria, Canada and seven other nations.
Beyond the food, International Coffee Hour is like a town square, a place where people from Alabama, the rest of the U.S. and dozens of countries meet and build friendships. That’s what happened to Lucy Spear, a Fayette native who serves as a peer advisor for international students.
“I think there’s something so powerful about having a conversation with someone who grew up differently from you. It helps you understand people more,” Spear said. “Manogya Khanal, she’s one of my best friends, and she’s from Nepal. Without coffee hour, I wouldn’t have met her.”
Khanal came to UA to study mechanical engineering and serves on the International Peer Advisory Council board. She said she loves what International Coffee Hour brings to the campus.
“I think coffee hour, in its core, stands for the exchange of culture and diverse groups of people coming together, asking questions or sharing their knowledge, where you can just talk about your shared curiosity…I can teach you so many things about my country, and you can teach me so many things about living in the States,” Khanal said.
During the coffee hour, room 2100 is filled with students’ voices. The conversations can be about almost anything: big things, such as global current events, and small things, like weekend plans, classes, memes and jokes.
“I think that’s one thing I like about coffee hour: it could be as deep as you want it to be. You can get as much as you want from it,” Spear said.
Each of the coffee hour events feels like a home away from home, Khanal said, because the conversations and camaraderie give her a chance to bond with students whose homes span the country and the world.
“Very lasting and meaningful relationships that I hope that I can carry on after college as well,” she said.
The International Coffee Hour’s future may include a bigger space and more cultural engagement, such as dance presentations or informal talks, Wolf said. But the bottom line will stay the same: getting people from different places into the same room to learn, discover and form strong, long-lasting bonds.
“We’ve got something good here at The University of Alabama and something that we should be proud of,” he said. “And we want more and more students to be able to experience it.”
The International Coffee Hour’s spring semester launches Friday, Jan. 16. The hour is held most Fridays in the UA Student Center, from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. More information, including a schedule of the countries featured this year, can be found at UA’s Capstone International Center website.